Water Jet Services

Water Jet Services

We have a complete water jet service available in the Jackson and central Mississippi area. Our trained technicians can cut your material to exacting specifications. A broad range of services are available. Your best value is to provide the material you want cut: glass, steel, aluminum, other metals and composite materials and an outline VECTOR drawing. We can provide you with a vector drawing on a price quote basis. Pick-up and delivery is also available in our target market of Jackson and central Mississippi.

Waterjet machining has been around for decades and is one of the fastest growing machining processes today. Its ease of use and its ability to cut almost any material while maintaining high precision make it suitable for a wide variety of applications. The water is pressurized to 50,000 p.s.i. and passes through a small-diameter diamond orifice to form a coherent jet of water. The jet then passes through a venturi section where a metered amount of granular abrasive is drawn into the water stream. The mixture of water and abrasive particles passes through a special ceramic mixing tube and the resulting abrasive/water slurry exits the nozzle as a focused stream of abrasive particles travelling at supersonic speed.

Operation

The awesome power of the waterjet cutting apparatus is only half the story. The cutting head is mounted onto a computer controlled, servo driven boom that travels in three directions that conform to the Cartesian coordinate system (an x, y, and z axis). To put this in simple terms, an outline (vector) drawing of the object is created in a CAD program. This drawing is then translated into a code the machine understands. The machine uses this code to create a tool path for the cutting head to follow. The stock material is secured to the work surface and machining begins. This “table” is a series of slats suspended over the water-filled catcher tank which dissipates the energy of the abrasive jet as it cuts through the material being machined.

The most important benefit of the waterjet cutter is its ability to cut material without interfering with the material’s inherent structure as there is no “heat affected zone” or HAZ. This allows metals, stone, plastics and glass to be cut without harming or changing their intrinsic properties.